Its always important to be analysing and testing your marketing efforts. Measuring the effectiveness of the strategies you use and putting money into the areas that work is key to the survival of any business.

Video Marketing is becoming without doubt the most effective weapon in your online advertising arsenal. By “video marketing” we mean any use of video to promote your business. But should you be producing videos for your business. Are the reasons for its effectiveness directly relevant you you and your sector?

Shall we get down and dirty with the ifs, buts and maybe’s of this issue with Sir Rob Walmsley, graphic illustrator extraordinaire and online marketing veteran?

Why would my business need an online video?

1. A video will increase Your Brand Stature & Your Trust

This is psychology at its base level. All the major brands, Sky, O2, Coke, Nike, McDonalds, Barclaycard are trying to get you to spend as much time with their brand as possible. The more familiar with their logo you are, the more your guard is let down and the more subconscious trust is built.

In the Indus valley circa. 2250 B.C.E. craftsmen working in bronze and stone created little square stamps with symbols on them which were sold to merchants for the stamping of their goods, and the brand has been with us ever since. By creating your own branded videos, you can breed familiarity & have your customers trust level increase.

3. People are Naturally Lazy

The mode of video feels more passive. By watching a video, all the information is presented to them is a comfortable manner. And they can see an actual demonstration of the product or service, either actually at work, or in a conceptional form, with visual pictures, presented in time to reinforce the points you make.

In advertising we use a concept called “say it and see it”, it sounds silly but studies have shown that your average UK consumer is 40% more likely to remember or “retain” an idea, benefit or feature of a product or service if they are shown it working at the same time a voiceover or presenter is verbally explaining the process.

4. Boost Engagement Time and Page Ranking

The simple fact is that well executed videos hold peoples attention for longer than static text text on a screen. Search engines rate up pages that they see users engaging with for longer. I.e.// people sat watching videos hosed on your website score you brownie points with google… there’s a little SEO trick for you right there.

The clincher here though is my use of the qualifier “well executed” videos. If you’ve split tested a text only marketing landing page aganst a marketing page containing one of those horrible fake-scribbled text videos edited to appallingly bland library music and found its conversions to be lacking… this may well be an indicator to try a different execution style of video rather than discounting the effectiveness of any video in your product area.

5. The nature of “Direct Audience Appeal”

People don't like to be bundled in with the rest of the masses. They like to feel that someone is speaking to them alone. If your video is executed in a conversational manner, then it feels like your product or service is presented to your target consumer as an individual. They feel more special.

6. Video provides another source of Inbound Traffic

Video is not only for your website, you can actually (and often more effectively) have a video that appears in front of your target audience, and then gently persuades them to visit yourwebsite.com and learn more about your products and services. Like a friendly host guiding you to your table at a high class restaurant.

But how does the magically “appears in front” of your customer part happen? Easier than you think. With a video hosted on youtube you can have your business introduction / offer video shown to people in between them viewing specific topics. i.e. you can decide what sort of videos your ideal customer is likely to be watching. For Land Rover, they happened to discover that a much higher percentage of customers watching country and western music videos ended up buying new cars than any other topic or theme of video. See how many Dolly Parton Promos you can watch before a big luxury cinematically shot 4x4 vehicle sidles onto your computer screen.

7. Social media is only as good as its content.

Your business will most likely have some form of social media presence. Ranging from minimal, if only to provide another search result for your business in google and push your competitors of the first page ranking for “your business name” as the search term. Or you may well have a very active set of social media accounts, Facebook posting engaging, amusing informative content relevent to your consumers, tweeting hop-topics and things they should know, visually pinning great images of your new products or executions, instagramming yourself at your latest seminar or attending the relevant trade conferences. Whatever the case, you’ll find pretty quickly that the effectiveness of social media is directly linked to the quality of information you disseminate to your followers. Tweet about nothing in particular three times in a row and expect to be un-followed. Video provides great, easily digestible, high-quality content that you can then reference across all channels.

2. Control the Order in Which the Information is Viewed.

With text on a screen, say in the modality of a long form sales letter, its far too easy for your customer to just scroll to the bottom of the page and look at the price. You'd never allow this in reality. If you'd planned a sales meeting with a customer you were visiting, and they asked what the price was straight after you walked in the door, you'd reply diplomatically, "hey buddy, I've come down here in person to show you the benefits of this new product, would you mind if i just went through the top features that we think make it really cool and then tell you the price, is that fair??" Well in video its a lot harder for them to spool through to the end on the time-slider, statistically most people just let the video play through. We measure this with something called page heat-mapping and video heat-mapping, so we can tell how long someone spends reading what part of our web pages and how many people fast forward our videos to what point. And in fact, in some of our video sales letter executions we've produced for our clients, we've actually disabled the play-bar, fast forward and rewind, enabling only the playing and pausing of the video, to produce higher conversions. See what I did there? ... bet you thought I'd made a mistake earlier jumping straight to three. But then you must have forgotten... this is Rob.

Online Marketing is fast gaining pace over traditional media for effective business promotion… but the reality is that its over subscribed. With everybody fighting to get to the top of google’s search results, theres a hell of a lot of content out there and being added to every day. The last thing you want to be doing is paying money just to add to this noise. The advantage video has over text and image advertising is that very few advertisers know how to use videos. One of our clients recently moved the same budget from pay per click text advertisement to a video-for-adwords campaign and saw a ten-fold increase in qualified leads. Not site visitors, but actual qualified leads asking for him to follow up with.

This is the power of creative, emotionally charged, professionally executed video advertising. But the disparate skill-sets of creativity, analytic planning and an understanding of human psychology usually mean employing and managing communication between a network of strangers which can be costly both in professional fees and your time.

Through the community of experts we’ve built up here at Energise we’d like to prove otherwise, check out some of our previous executions under the “creative” tag to see some examples of what we mean. And don’t hesitate to drop us a line to see if there’s a starting point you’d be happy to take a punt on ;)

In this age of the survival of the creativeiest, let I, Rob, be your guide.